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Interested in seeing how your site runs on the new windows 7? Fancy having a play with the new windows operating system free and ahead of it’s official launch? Find out more about MSDN here

As developers, we are interested in all browser releases, OS releases and software on the market but there is a benefit for end users also. We run several versions of linux here, MAC OS and windows XP here at www.awebserver.co.uk, with every browser possible, but we have also downloaded and run the latest windows 7 to evaluate it’s facilities and so far, so good.

As most of you will know, windows has evolved over the years with most stability coming from windows 2000 and XP Pro with some bloopers surrounding ME and of course Vista which has been quickly dusted under the carpet with mention of it’s predecessor windows 7.0 ahead of time.

On the face of it, it looks really good. A polished interface with some MAC type touches are a welcome addition to this latest version of windows, but rather than ranting on about how we like it, why not try for yourself! You can download the latest evaluation version for free and run it on a spare computer to test it out.

Simply download the software from the link below, burn it onto a DVD, insert into your computer and reboot.

Download Windows 7 Release Candidate

Not only can you download windows 7.0 but you can also download many other microsoft releases for testing purposes. It is free and although robust (in the case of windows 7) it is not to be used commercially, as the system will expire in 2010 on a fixed date.

The market place is a mix of die hard MAC lovers  raving about it’s robust OS and high performance computing, inhibited only by it’s high cost and then we have Linux users, growing in numbers and generating more interest month by month with reliable, virus resilient and robust OS which is free, but beyond the skillset of most everyday computer users and then of course, the mainstream – windows. Whether we love it or hate it (and we generally love it) windows is mainstream computing at it’s best and windows 7 looks like it might finally be a decent reliable OS to work with from day 1. ….. or will it?

Windows 7 RC1: Windows XP Mode

Perhaps the biggest surprise – and for Microsoft, possibly the biggest boost – is a feature that has been announced but not yet available: Windows XP Mode, which will run XP applications in an XP compatibility box, but make them appear as if they are running directly in Windows 7 itself. In this way, it is hoped that users will get the best of both worlds – the compatibility of XP and the shinier new Windows 7 interface.

The feature sounds underwhelming until you dig into the details. According to Microsoft, you won’t actually have to manually run Virtual PC to run those XP applications once you’ve installed them; instead, they will appear to work directly within Windows 7.

You’ll just have to run Virtual PC the first time and run the application – from that point on, it will appear to be just other application running directly in Windows 7 (at least, that’s the promise). And you won’t have to buy XP separately – your Windows 7 EULA (end-user licence agreement) includes XP as well. In essence, you get two operating systems for the price of one.

This solves one of Microsoft’s biggest problems with XP very cleverly – it’s such a solid, stable operating system that people simply don’t want to give it up to move to a newer operating system. Now they don’t have to – they can run XP as if it were a part of Windows 7.

Microsoft says WinXP Mode will soon be ready for download, and as soon as it is, I’ll follow up with a report on how well it works.

Windows 7 RC1: Speeding things up

We ran this on a 5 year old acer laptop aspire 3002LMi (AMD Sempron 2.8 with 512MB RAM) which had problems with drivers when running Linux Ubuntu, so we thought it was an ideal unit for testing windows 7.0.  Even at that configuration, the operating system was surprisingly fast, seemingly even faster than the beta, which represented a significant performance improvement over Windows Vista.

Despite the initial installation running smoothly, I noticed interference lines running across the screen during which i assumed was to do with a default driver for the graphics card. On investigation, the audio, graphics and network drivers were missing, but luckily the wireless driver worked straight out of the box. After an initial connection to the internet, the missing drivers were automatically picked up, downloaded, installed and the system rebooted.  After that, the laptop worked like a charm.

Windows 7 RC1: Overall interface improvements

Windows 7 RC1 includes a host of subtle user-interface changes that, taken together, represent an improvement over the beta.

For example, Windows 7 RC1′s task bar is the most visible improvement over Windows Vista. In the beta, the task bar was already impressive; in RC1, it has been tweaked to become even more useful.

If you frequently open many files in a single application, you’ll welcome the new feature Microsoft calls “task bar thumbnail overflow”.

As with the Windows 7 beta, when you have many files open in an application and hover your mouse over its icon on the task bar, you’ll see a list of files open, rather than their individual thumbnails, because that many thumbnails simply can’t fit on your screen.

In Windows 7 RC1, this list view has been juiced up, and it works more like the thumbnail view. Highlight any file on the list, and you’ll “peek” at the highlighted window, just as you can do in thumbnail view. In addition, you can close any window by clicking a small “X” in the same way as you can in thumbnail view.

Keyboard junkies will appreciate a new keyboard shortcut for the task bar that makes it easier to jump to an individual window in an application without having to use the mouse.

As with the beta version of Windows 7, you can still use the keyboard to launch any application that has been pinned to the task bar. For example, if Microsoft Word is the second item pinned to the task bar, press Windows Key-2, and you’ll launch Word.

With Windows 7 RC1, though, you can now cycle through individual windows within any application on the task bar. For example, if Word is the second icon on the task bar, and it has several windows open, hold down the Windows key, then press 2 repeatedly; each time you press the 2 key, you’ll cycle through a new open window in Word.

The task bar has gotten several other new features as well. It can display more pinned icons than previously, so that if you have many of them pinned, you no longer have to scroll through them.

For example, at a resolution of 1024 by 768, you’ll be able to see 15 rather than the previous 12 icons if you use large icons, and 22 rather than 16 if you use small icons.

Windows 7 RC1: Making the jump

The beta of Windows 7 introduced Jump Lists, which are lists of actions or items associated with a particular application. In the beta, to see a Jump List for any application, you right-clicked its icon in the task bar or Start menu.

Typically, you’d see a list of the most recent open files (or websites, in the case of Internet Explorer), as well as options to pin or unpin the application icon to and from the task bar.

Windows 7 RC1 tweaks the Jump Lists by giving you some control over the maximum number of items on the list – you can now limit it to under 10. In addition, if you right-click the Control Panel when it’s in the task bar, you’ll see a list of the most recently used Control Panel features and applets.

That’s mildly useful. It would be better if you could see a similar Jump List when you right-click Control Panel on the Start Menu. Unfortunately, though, you don’t.

In Windows 7 RC1, you can also manually pin files to a Jump List for a program that doesn’t normally handle that file type – something that you couldn’t do in the beta. You can then open the file using the program to which it has been pinned.

But be careful when you use this feature, because it can lead to unintended consequences: when you drag the file to an application’s Jump List, that application will now open all files of that type when you double-click the file.

For example, drag an HTML file to Notepad, and Notepad will always open HTML files from then on, rather than, say, Internet Explorer. (Of course, Internet Explorer will continue to open HTML pages on the internet or a network.)

Those who use Remote Desktop Connection to take control of other computers on their networks will have something to be pleased about – when you pin the Remote Desktop Connection to your task bar, it now includes in the Jump List all of the remote desktop connections you’ve saved. So you can now more easily take control of a remote PC.

Microsoft also claims that now you can change task-bar settings in a more reliable way. In earlier versions, including Windows 7 beta, when you made changes to the task bar, those changes were permanently saved only after Explorer exited at the end of a session.

If there was a crash or if Windows did not shut down properly, the task-bar settings wouldn’t be in effect for the next session. Microsoft says that the taskbar changes are now made permanently within 30 seconds of when they are applied, which should eliminate the problem.

Alt-Tab windows switching has been improved; the feature has now been combined with Aero Peek. When you use Alt-Tab to cycle through your open windows, if you pause on any, you’ll be able to peek through to the desktop and see the open window as well as the underlying desktop, along with outlines of any other open windows.

I found this new piece of eye candy very useful because I no longer had to guess at the contents of any open window – I could see it immediately.

Windows 7: Networking Improvements

Windows 7 adds a few networking improvements that Vista and XP lacked. One of the most significant of these is HomeGroups, which give structure to the process of sharing devices and media files over a home network.

Setting up a HomeGroup between two or more Windows 7 PCs automates the sharing of Libraries (collections of pictures, music files, movies, or documents), printers, and storage devices. Windows 7 also increases the number of SMB network connections that you can have in a single network.

Setting up a HomeGroup needn’t put all of your systems at risk, it seems. When you create one, Windows generates a secure passkey that you must enter on every system that you add to the HomeGroup, which should help keep interlopers from reaching your shared files and devices, even if they manage to get onto your wireless network.

Windows 7: Performance

The biggest question on everyone’s mind is whether Windows 7 introduces much-needed performance improvements over Vista. We can’t answer that yet, but we can say that it seems a little faster.

Throughout the OS, windows open faster, apps seem to launch more quickly, and the interface seems a little snappier than it was with my Vista installation on the same machine.

Startup is a bit quicker, too, getting us from power-on to fully booted in about 74 seconds, versus 87 seconds prior to the upgrade. This comparison is totally unscientific, mind you, and we’ll do more extensive testing in the Test Centre soon. But our first impression was that Windows 7 generally outperformed Vista on the hardware we used.